Writing a failed love story makes me reflect on what happens when the person is gone but the feelings remain. (Writing book # 2, where this is a plot point). It made me research quotes on yearning, some of which are so beautiful I want to rub them into my heart like a salve. Except they sting.

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?”
James Patterson

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been.”
Fernando Pessoa

“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”
Elizabeth Gilbert

“I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn’t.”
Sarah Dessen

And, my favorite:

“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,–so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, ‘There is no memory of him here!’
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!”
Edna St. Vincent Millay